Game Details

You would be forgiven for getting tired of procedurally generated and "roguelike" video games. Too often, these types of games rely on the gimmick of random content, as opposed to finely crafted, enjoyable experiences. Math and procedural trickery don't make up for a game whose difficulty or boredom doesn't come with a payoff.

You'd also be forgiven for looking at new game Strafe's list of qualities and insta-vomming. It started as a Kickstarter, made by a developer nobody has heard of, with a reliance on dated visuals, cheesy advertising, and... wait for it... procedurally generated levels. Honestly, that list of gimmicks reads like prime fodder for Ars Technica's e-mail spam filter.

And yet, here I am, determined to convince you that this recipe for disaster turned out well. I've had a full week to play through so many bloody, '90s throwback levels of Strafe's first-person running-and-gunning, and I've had pretty much nothing but fun. The game wears its biggest issues on its blocky, voxel sleeves, almost as a badge of pride, and, as a result, it's not for everyone.

But no game in recent memory has done as good of a job letting players slide into their favorite memories of mid-'90s shooters—while livening up their pace and tension.

Robo-spider-monkey things, bloodthirsty lemur-men

Pick only one of these three weapons.

Time to make the place bloody.

Go crazy with a machine gun to dispense violence...

...or skip the weapons at the outset and use a surprisingly effective wrench, instead.

Just one of the game's many, many randomly generated corridors.

If you're not careful, your shields and ammo will run out fast. You'll need a lot of in-game "scrap" to restock them.

If you get to the exit without killing any enemies chasing you, then you'll have to wait a few seconds for the exit door to open. It's an easy way to wind up dead.

Strafer needs food badly.

Crates contain various bonuses for your guns, including boosts for clip size and accuracy.

I didn't find any secrets today.

Blood, blood, blood.

Frog as a deadly weapon.

I don't want to hang out with this guy for long.

You'll eventually get above ground.

Die, lemur man, die.

Electric gun? Why, you shouldn't have.

I've yet to run into this monster. I'm not sure that I want to.

Need a plot? Eff you! You only get a cheesy VHS-styled tutorial, complete with a real-life actress doing a solid Brenda Walsh impression. She explains that you've been hired to explore abandoned spaceships and collect valuable scrap for a corporation. The Weyland-Yutani vibe is immediate, intense, and shameless—and then that's it. Time to kill.

Every time you boot the game, you get to pick from one of three default weapons: machine gun, railgun, or single-barrel shotgun. These should feel instantly familiar to anybody who has played Quake II, which had all three, and they have obvious strengths and weaknesses in terms of firing rate, effective range, magazine sizes, and so on. Unlike Quake II, these weapons must be reloaded when their clips run out, and, if you reload while using a half-full clip, you lose those bullets. They also each have their own unique grenade launcher, which uses up over half a mag's bullets per shot.

The Weyland-Yutani vibe is immediate, intense, and shameless.

You only get to hold one default weapon throughout the game, and your gun of choice can be powered up with boosts that you find along the way (magazine size, strength, accuracy, grenade power, etc.). Other guns, including beefier versions of the ones you didn't choose, will appear as pick-ups, usually with roughly 10-20 bullets loaded and no way to get more ammo. You'll also eventually find interesting boosts outside of your weaponry, including assistant drones and ways to boost your health or armor mid-run. Once you die, all of these boosts are lost, and you start from the beginning.

Each of Strafe's levels always starts and ends in the same way. Every other element is always freshly generated. In Strafe's case, that means different '90s-looking corridors, stairwells, hallways, elevators, bridges, caverns, and more are continuously remixed and rearranged. The beauty isn't just that these remixed levels always look slightly different; I really don't recall seeing giant stretches that looked identical between sessions. What Strafe nails so incredibly well is how its monster populations fill these spaces out—and how the geometry always makes the most of these dumb-as-a-rock enemies.

In some cases, you'll think that there's nothing brilliant going on. Throw a grenade into one big room, and eight dumb peons—which all look like bipedal, hammer-wielding sloths—run directly at you down a big hallway. Pick 'em off through this funneled path, and that's it. Enemies are dead. Whew. What's this I hear about the game being so hard, anyway?

That's when the hazards pile up. Laser-shooting robots join the mix, and some of these are good at dodging. Acid-spitting turrets appear on high points of walls, slathering the level in permanent, painful pools of orange acid until you take them out. Robo-spider-monkey things dot the ceilings, hoping to punish you for not picking them off when you might have had a vantage point earlier. That list just describes the first few levels, and it doesn't even account for monster closets. Not only do monster closets appear when you least want them to, but they're usually positioned in a way that their monsters can flank you from two or three angles if you're not careful.

All these monsters pack a serious punch, so your games will end quickly if you're not careful. Health and armor are typically scarce, with occasional bonuses appearing out of nowhere, and you'll often find yourself losing 20-30 percent of your total health+armor tally just by not accounting for a single bad guy in your blind spot. The damage you incur in one level feels exponentially worse in the next one, as you cling to your last few points of health and begin creeping with your best, low-ammo weapon ready in case a random monster closet bursts open.

This brutal difficulty is made up for by weapons that feel very powerful between their damage rates and audio-visual punch. Strafe's blocky, Unreal 1-era monsters gib and bleed all over the place, and their cardboard-robot designs pop with giddy dismemberment with all of your weapons. And power-ups and bonuses appear at a nice clip; for example, when you're about to drown in despair, maybe that's when you stumble upon a second barrel for your shotgun. What's more, the tuning of your every action—your jumps, your default run speed, your firing rates, the pop and impact of weapons—just feels right, much like how Super Mario's running, jumping, and descending all feel instantly controllable. Almost immediately, Strafe makes clear that you can be a badass. You know, before pummeling you to death.

No to gamepads—or people with high blood pressure

Enlarge/ If the normal game isn't retro enough for you, maybe you can find this even lower-res shooter tucked into the game somewhere.

While Strafe doesn't look as dreary and dismal as Quake, it certainly keeps its color palette limited and its textures downright crappy. You can run the game at 4K resolution if you want (we did), but Strafe intentionally looks dated and pixellated. I found these visuals were ultimately easy to read, thanks to bright blasts of lighting and hazards like acid baths, and I could make my way around levels by tracking where I'd left big piles of dead bodies. However, I could see players getting lost in these randomly generated levels thanks to a lot of repeating brown and gray textures and walls. (An optional mini-map doesn't really help.)

Be advised: a gamepad is a terrible idea here, because Strafe demands plenty of rapid movement and twitchy reactions. I tried adjusting and changing gamepad settings to make the game work, and I am happy playing some first-person shooters with an Xbox-styled pad. But not this one.

Strafe severely lacks enemy variety per "world." This becomes glaring as you try, and try, and try again to beat the first world, which is made up of three levels. Getting used to Strafe's challenge spikes and monster-placement flow just takes a while, and you're going to see those robots and lemur-people again and again along the way.

But I still think the enemy variety is enough to propel players forward, mostly because of how Strafe's combination of powers, levels, and foes makes players feel simultaneously powerful and weak. Every day during my review period, I enjoyed booting into Strafe, having a few 20- or 30-minute runs that each felt equal parts nostalgic and fresh, and moving on to other stuff.

I don't necessarily have the urge to reload Quake's E1M5 on a regular basis. (And Gloom Keep is badass, I admit.) I do love the idea of that Quake-like first-time feeling, of wondering what monster or secret was around every corner. Strafe's hodgepodge of randomly generated delights and consistent, time-tested FPS power gets me there every time.

The good:

Random level generation system is solid, and monster appearances make each run feel unique

Finely tuned FPS systems mean players are constantly walking the line between feeling badass and vulnerable

There is nothing "fake" or "real" about it. Its a 3d world, with sprite based characters, commonly referred to as 2.5d. Many games did this (Doom, Marathon, to name a few). Quake was the first fully 3d shooter.

As for this game, it does greatly remind me of Quake 1, and I may pick it up. But am really hoping the horrible FPS is because of the video, and not the game being limited to a terrible frame rate.

There is nothing "fake" or "real" about it. Its a 3d world, with sprite based characters, commonly referred to as 2.5d. Many games did this (Doom, Marathon, to name a few). Quake was the first fully 3d shooter.

As for this game, it does greatly remind me of Quake 1, and I may pick it up. But am really hoping the horrible FPS is because of the video, and not the game being limited to a terrible frame rate.

The level geometry was not fully 3D, which is why it falls into the fake class. It was very well faked, though.

There is nothing "fake" or "real" about it. Its a 3d world, with sprite based characters, commonly referred to as 2.5d. Many games did this (Doom, Marathon, to name a few). Quake was the first fully 3d shooter.

Those aren't actually 3D worlds - they use flat maps with height values assigned to the coordinates on the map, but they have the same limitations you'd get in a 2D engine. That's why none of them were able to accomplish things we'd consider incredibly basic now, like stacking one room over another one - Duke 3D comes close, but only by using portals that connect to a different area on the map entirely.

I'd be interested if it had coop play over LAN, as in Quake 1 and Duke 3D. Just as a single player game, however, I think I'd rather just play the new Doom again.

Limiting you to one weapon seems like a lame gimmick, and the bit about reloading while using a half-full magazine causing you to lose ammo seems about as anti-nineties shooter as it comes. Seriously, the only shooter I remember playing "back in the day" with that mechanic was the Half Life mod Firearms* and that was in 1998-2005.

Those grips aside, I like the concept.

*EDIT: And now that I remember back, Firearms didn't even make you lose the ammo, you still carried that half full magazine with you and (primitively) managed your inventory of them, and there was even a merge mechanic.

FA was going for realism at the time however, so anything like that still does not fit in a game like Strafe.

Only if you discount Descent, Terminator: Future Shock, and others, and decide that the genre doesn't stretch to System Shock.

I loved the idea of Descent when I was a kid but never got that far into it at the time...didn't have a joystick, nor twitchy FPS keyboard and mouse instincts, so I just sucked at it.

Years later, after playing many other FPSes, having internalized the WASD + C + Spacebar control scheme (using C and Spacebar to strafe down and up), on a much more powerful computer, with an entirely new rendering engine...I finally played through it. What a great f--king game.

Never did get all the way through Descent 2. Also a great game, but the Thief-bot literally ruined it for me.

Still wanna try them out in VR. That was my dream as a kid growing up, when the only VR headsets were dual CRTs strapped to your face.

Limiting you to one weapon seems like a lame gimmick, and the bit about reloading while using a half-full magazine causing you to lose ammo seems about as anti-nineties shooter as it comes. Seriously, the only shooter I remember playing "back in the day" with that mechanic was the Half Life mod Firearms and that was in 1998-2005.

<puts on nerd hat>Action Half-Life did it before Firearms, and Action Quake before that. AHL even had a neat mechanic that if a bullet was in the chamber you could reload and have 13 rounds instead of 12. Also you could only carry 2 clips, but that didn't matter because they were everywhere...

<puts on nerd hat>Action Half-Life did it before Firearms, and Action Quake before that. AHL even had a neat mechanic that if a bullet was in the chamber you could reload and have 13 rounds instead of 12. Also you could only carry 2 clips, but that didn't matter because they were everywhere...

Damn, now I miss that game too.

Hmm, I somehow missed that one in my Half Life days.. How did it stand up to The Specialists? Going by the wiki entry, Action Half-Life sounds like it has a very similar premise.

I believe you could do the plus one reload trick in Firearms as well, or at least in the later versions where they started to really make the mod special.

<puts on nerd hat>Action Half-Life did it before Firearms, and Action Quake before that. AHL even had a neat mechanic that if a bullet was in the chamber you could reload and have 13 rounds instead of 12. Also you could only carry 2 clips, but that didn't matter because they were everywhere...

Damn, now I miss that game too.

Hmm, I somehow missed that one in my Half Life days.. How did it stand up to The Specialists? Going by the wiki entry, Action Half-Life sounds like it has a very similar premise.

I believe you could do the plus one reload trick in Firearms as well, or at least in the later versions where they started to really make the mod special.

If it's anything like Action Quake, imagine The Specialists but without all the stunts and extra bits and much, much faster.

I'd be interested if it had coop play over LAN, as in Quake 1 and Duke 3D. Just as a single player game, however, I think I'd rather just play the new Doom again.

Limiting you to one weapon seems like a lame gimmick, and the bit about reloading while using a half-full magazine causing you to lose ammo seems about as anti-nineties shooter as it comes. Seriously, the only shooter I remember playing "back in the day" with that mechanic was the Half Life mod Firearms* and that was in 1998-2005.

Those grips aside, I like the concept.

*EDIT: And now that I remember back, Firearms didn't even make you lose the ammo, you still carried that half full magazine with you and (primitively) managed your inventory of them, and there was even a merge mechanic.

FA was going for realism at the time however, so anything like that still does not fit in a game like Strafe.

I think the lose ammo on reload mechanic here is more designed to punish you for reloading early, thereby forcing you into situations where you aren't fully loaded, increasing stress and difficulty. I do not think they're doing that for realism, unlike Arma games or milsims like that..

The game may be great but that video was awful. The "hardness" was not demonstrated at all. And the "stand still while aiming" just made that impression worse. Fortunately I knew about the game prior to seeing the article. This video managed to make it look boring though. At least the first half. I stopped watching.

I'd be interested if it had coop play over LAN, as in Quake 1 and Duke 3D. Just as a single player game, however, I think I'd rather just play the new Doom again.

Limiting you to one weapon seems like a lame gimmick, and the bit about reloading while using a half-full magazine causing you to lose ammo seems about as anti-nineties shooter as it comes. Seriously, the only shooter I remember playing "back in the day" with that mechanic was the Half Life mod Firearms* and that was in 1998-2005.

Those grips aside, I like the concept.

*EDIT: And now that I remember back, Firearms didn't even make you lose the ammo, you still carried that half full magazine with you and (primitively) managed your inventory of them, and there was even a merge mechanic.

FA was going for realism at the time however, so anything like that still does not fit in a game like Strafe.

It is pretty funny, the sort of standard 'throwback' quirks are more related to the subjective experience of the programmer (who played the game as a child/teen) than any tangible thing.

Quake isn't that hard, but let-me-tell-you, it was tricky with 10-year-old reflexes (especially given that we weren't weened on online multiplayer games back then). And while now I understand that one of the reasons Quake spread so much was the fantastic lan support (for the time), that stuff was way too confusing for me at the time. So, it was a single player experience.

Throwing away magazines? Not a feature. But you could definitely imagine Quake Guy tossing half empty magazines -- at least, much more so that you could imagine him carefully reloading the things.

The game may be great but that video was awful. The "hardness" was not demonstrated at all. And the "stand still while aiming" just made that impression worse. Fortunately I knew about the game prior to seeing the article. This video managed to make it look boring though. At least the first half. I stopped watching.

runs can start very lightly, like in that video. I also filmed some runs of me running through wielding nothing more than a wrench and dashing in a speed-run kind of way. those also ended poorly. but I really look forward to watching legitimate speedruns of this game.

I'm not very good at FPS. I still got pretty far in the Doom reboot (not on easy) because it's NOT randomly-generated. After I die, I know exactly what's coming, so I can think about how I'll redo the battle. It's hard for me to care that much in a rouge-like, when I can just push the reset button.

As a programmer who understands algorithms, I've always found rouge-likes boring. I could just as easily play a round of Solitaire, and get the same experience finding patterns in randomness.

Game looks good, I saw this on Kickstarter quite a while ago, might pick it up after I finish my current pile of stuff. That said, I'm not totally convinced by the video. Either Sam was playing with mouse acceleration on, or too high a sensitivity which makes the camera movement very jittery (or his aim is just terrible, that's also a legitimate explanation). He also stays a bit too static while shooting, which IMO isn't a very good representation of the type of gameplay you can expect in this type of genre.

There is nothing "fake" or "real" about it. Its a 3d world, with sprite based characters, commonly referred to as 2.5d. Many games did this (Doom, Marathon, to name a few). Quake was the first fully 3d shooter.

Those aren't actually 3D worlds - they use flat maps with height values assigned to the coordinates on the map, but they have the same limitations you'd get in a 2D engine. That's why none of them were able to accomplish things we'd consider incredibly basic now, like stacking one room over another one - Duke 3D comes close, but only by using portals that connect to a different area on the map entirely.

A cool video visually explaining how it works. Why Wolf3D had to have 90 degree walls and how it was solved with Doom. Also it explains some of the trickery of the Build engine. Good stuff.

There is nothing "fake" or "real" about it. Its a 3d world, with sprite based characters, commonly referred to as 2.5d. Many games did this (Doom, Marathon, to name a few). Quake was the first fully 3d shooter.

Those aren't actually 3D worlds - they use flat maps with height values assigned to the coordinates on the map, but they have the same limitations you'd get in a 2D engine. That's why none of them were able to accomplish things we'd consider incredibly basic now, like stacking one room over another one - Duke 3D comes close, but only by using portals that connect to a different area on the map entirely.

A cool video visually explaining how it works. Why Wolf3D had to have 90 degree walls and how it was solved with Doom. Also it explains some of the trickery of the Build engine. Good stuff.

Yeah, this stuff really is pretty fascinating and some of the tricks involved are extremely clever. I'd honestly recommend that anybody with the programming know-how to do it give writing an engine like that a shot, because it's hard to get across just how brilliant some of them are unless you've tried to solve the same problems.

There is nothing "fake" or "real" about it. Its a 3d world, with sprite based characters, commonly referred to as 2.5d. Many games did this (Doom, Marathon, to name a few). Quake was the first fully 3d shooter.

Those aren't actually 3D worlds - they use flat maps with height values assigned to the coordinates on the map, but they have the same limitations you'd get in a 2D engine. That's why none of them were able to accomplish things we'd consider incredibly basic now, like stacking one room over another one - Duke 3D comes close, but only by using portals that connect to a different area on the map entirely.

A cool video visually explaining how it works. Why Wolf3D had to have 90 degree walls and how it was solved with Doom. Also it explains some of the trickery of the Build engine. Good stuff.

Yeah, this stuff really is pretty fascinating and some of the tricks involved are extremely clever. I'd honestly recommend that anybody with the programming know-how to do it give writing an engine like that a shot, because it's hard to get across just how brilliant some of them are unless you've tried to solve the same problems.

I once spent an entire semester's worth of computer classes in high school writing a 3D engine for my TI-89 graphing calculator. (The classes in question were so basic I took one look at the syllabus on the first day and decided it was a waste of my time.) Learned a lot about assembly programming, memory management, 3D math (and thus Calculus), and data compression algorithms. Fun stuff.

There is nothing "fake" or "real" about it. Its a 3d world, with sprite based characters, commonly referred to as 2.5d. Many games did this (Doom, Marathon, to name a few). Quake was the first fully 3d shooter.

Those aren't actually 3D worlds - they use flat maps with height values assigned to the coordinates on the map, but they have the same limitations you'd get in a 2D engine. That's why none of them were able to accomplish things we'd consider incredibly basic now, like stacking one room over another one - Duke 3D comes close, but only by using portals that connect to a different area on the map entirely.

A cool video visually explaining how it works. Why Wolf3D had to have 90 degree walls and how it was solved with Doom. Also it explains some of the trickery of the Build engine. Good stuff.

Yeah, this stuff really is pretty fascinating and some of the tricks involved are extremely clever. I'd honestly recommend that anybody with the programming know-how to do it give writing an engine like that a shot, because it's hard to get across just how brilliant some of them are unless you've tried to solve the same problems.

I once spent an entire semester's worth of computer classes in high school writing a 3D engine for my TI-89 graphing calculator. (The classes in question were so basic I took one look at the syllabus on the first day and decided it was a waste of my time.) Learned a lot about assembling programming, memory management, 3D math (and thus Calculus), and data compression algorithms. Fun stuff.

I once built a raycasting engine that did rendering exclusively using HTML DOM elements, just to see if I could make something that incredibly stupid work on a moderately weak computer. I did, but... well, suffice to say that floors are a bitch.

There is nothing "fake" or "real" about it. Its a 3d world, with sprite based characters, commonly referred to as 2.5d. Many games did this (Doom, Marathon, to name a few). Quake was the first fully 3d shooter.

2D sprites have nothing to do with why those old shooters were "2.5D". The reason they're 2.5D is because of the rendering technology they used to draw the world. If you recall they never had anything other than perfectly vertical walls and perfectly flat floor/ceiling surfaces, and most significantly you could never have a hole/door/window/exit in a wall above another one. The reason for that is because the world was literally 2D.

The only reason it seemed like you could even have areas above other areas was for the ability you might remember from the 5D Marathon map: It was possible to have multiple areas in the same 2D space but with no interaction. So you just do that but make one seem higher than the other, and you're faking having an area above another area.